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I continue to be gobsmacked at how quickly the patreon jumped up over the past week! We’re now only $29 short of the monthly goal that will trigger the serialization of Bound by the Blood, the first book in my long-long-long awaited “BDSM meets sex magic in modern NYC” paranormal romance series.

(UPDATE: WE HAVE REACHED GOAL! AND the serialization has begun over on Patreon. See all chapters that have been posted: https://www.patreon.com/collection/886649?view=condensed)

To encourage folks to get us to the goal, I’m posting a sample chapter here! Now, you’d think I would post this on Patreon itself, BUT they have a rule that says if there’s anything naughty, it has to stay behind the paywall. So I’m posting it on my regular ol’ blog(s).

Enjoy!

Let’s start with the night I met Clive—boots laced up, my corset cinched, and a bag of whips on my shoulder. I’ll start somewhere you might recognize: a nightclub with an upstairs dance floor. The city is full of clubs like it—a thousand different vibes to suit a thousand different crowds. Upscale, downtown, psychedelic, cyberpunk, Bollywood, cowgirl, you name it.

A shirtless man would grab my attention in any of them, but especially in Purgatory.

Before I saw him, I had been asking myself why the hell I was there. The place was goth, but once a month the dance floor turned into a dungeon. People go to these places—all of these places—to hook up. Not just for sex. People go to bars when they’re lonely, when they’re looking for connection.

I wasn’t ready for connection. Not so soon after severing ties with Ethan. But there I was, anyway.

Clive—I didn’t know that was his name yet—was standing by the empty deejay booth, looking comfortable in his bare skin. A typical darkwave dance-trance playlist was on, but that night was for a different sort of dance. Two leathermen had been flogging a third on the St. Andrew’s cross, but they were mostly done, just running their hands up and down his bare back and buttocks. One of them snapped the elastic waistband of his thong and all three of them laughed. A witchy long-haired androgyne smiled in their direction and then glided down the stairs. A few mixed-gender couples nursed drinks at the tall cocktail tables along the far wall. It was early, not yet crowded, and the spanking bench and other play stations were empty…

Mirrored from Cecilia Tan.

I went to the massive Romance Writers of America national conference this past week and one of the best things about this conference is that so many of the top writers in the genre are here. RWA and the romance community at large is extremely open. It’s the only place I know of where you can take workshops presented by writers who have literally sold in the tens of millions of books where they tell you how you can do it, too.

One event I did not want to miss was the Paranormal Authors Chat with Heather Graham, Nalini Singh, and Rebecca Zanetti. Since I have a paranormal/urban fantasy series starting with Tor Books in 2017 (The Vanished Chronicles), I definitely wanted to soak up whatever wisdom I could. These women are three giants of the field, plus Heather Graham was so unbelievably nice to me when I was a young struggling writer years and years ago that I still remember it vividly.

(The story: We were at a group signing together at a bookstore, I was feeling like an unknown, unwanted piece of chopped liver, while she had a line out of the door. I was at the seat next to her. She could have ignored me and instead she made me feel welcome and included. I love her forever, and this same spirit of inclusion and helping others pervades the whole RWA so far as I can tell.)

You can look up each of these writers’ bona fides but if you are new to them, they are all New York Times bestsellers many times over. Nalini Singh is the author of the Psy-Changeling and the Guild Hunter series among many dozens of other books. Rebecca Zanetti has published over 25 dark paranormals and has been a finalist for the RT Award. Heather Graham has written close to 200 vampire and paranormal novels at this point and was a founder of Florida’s chapter o the RWA. Giants, I tell you.

What I’m presenting here is a boiled-down version of the chat that took place. It looks like a transcript but I only capture about 60-70% of what is actually said, and I don’t always get exactly the right words, so don’t take this as quotable gospel. Also I only include here the portion with moderator questions. The audience questions were also fantastic and I learned a lot, but you know, if you want ALL of it, you have to start coming to these conventions yourself… (or buy the audio recordings of the convention, which are available through the RWA!).

Why did you chose paranormal?

Nalini: I write about telapths and shapefhuters and vampires and angels…why? I started with that because I’ve always been fascinated with the potential of our minds, if we could use 100% of our brains 100% of the time. But what’s the cost of that? What it drove you insane? That was the genesis of the Psy series. The shapeshifters just kind of showed up in the book, as they do because it’s a paranornmal. I wanted to write some shifter that were at home in their skins because I had just read a bunch of books wher the shifters are never happy! I thought I would love to be able to change into a tiger. Why aren’t there any shifters in books who like being shifters? So mine are. The Guild Hunter series… there are angels and vampires and… I just believe in not thinking too much about it. If you think too much about it you think, wow that’s weird… I really believe just let it out and it might be bonkers but let it be awesome bonkers.

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Paranormal Romance: Dead, Soft, or Rearing Up to Bite?
With Kate Douglas, Rebecca Zanetti, and Cynthia Eden
RWA 2014 Panel

So one thing I think I’ve learned about panels and workshops at RWA. Very often the people teaching them are not just “bestselling authors.” Very often they’ve got book sales in the millions, and the number of novels they have published is 50, 100, 200… These are not lightweights.

On this panel alone, which intrigued me because the rumor that “Paranormal is dead” has been going around New York publishing for a while now, we had Kate Douglas, author of 53 paranormals, 38 with New York publishers, but also some with Ellora’s Cave and some self-published, Rebecca Zanetti, a multi-bestseller with Grand Central, Entangled and Kensington, and Cynthia Eden, a two-time Rita award finalist who has been on the NYT, USA Today, and Digital Book World bestseller lists.

Here are just a few of the pithy and relevant things they said that I noted for myself. They began by explaining that they put the panel together because they were at a previous conference where there was a panel that said paranormal is over, you should run away from it as fast as you can. All the paranormal authors were talking afterward and saying to each other, are you doing okay? And they found out that actually they were all doing pretty well.

“Look how crowded this session is,” Cynthia Eden pointed out. “I think that’s a sign how much interest there is in this genre. There is still a market.”

Kate Douglas put the rumors of demise in perspective this way: “I had 31 [paranormals] with Kensington and sales suddenly tanked. But now there are so many successful self-published ones. I did a series with Kensington where they did one, I did one, then did the third, I did the fourth. And sales are comparable.” (Speaking of the Dark Wolf series.)

Rebecca Zanetti: “I heard yesterday that you ‘had to’ self-publish if you do PNR. But I have two friends who just sold PNR debuts to major publishers. Those readers are out there.”

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.